Terraria: How to create and your own server

In May 2011, a team of four de­velopers using the name Re-Logic released the first version of the sandbox game Terraria for Windows users on Steam. Ten years later, the game is also available for Linux and Mac, Play­Sta­tion, XboX, iOS, Android, and Nintendo devices. If you want to explore the randomly generated game world with other players, it’s best to create your own Terraria server. Find out how this works in this guide and why rented hardware is the best solution.

If you want to play Terraria online with other users, you have two options. You can use the ‘Host & Play’ feature in the Terraria client to host your own online game on your device. Other players can then join the world either with or without a password. If you quit the game, however, the server will auto­mat­ic­ally end the session. If you want to prevent this, you have to go for option number two and run Terraria’s dedicated server software. As long as this ap­plic­a­tion is running, you and other players can connect to the Terraria server via the ‘Join via IP’ item in the game client.

The­or­et­ic­ally, you can run a dedicated server software on your home PC as well. However, for con­tinu­ously operating the Terraria server, this device would have to run around the clock, which results in high elec­tri­city costs. The main­ten­ance of the hardware would be your re­spons­ib­il­ity, too. In addition, a stable and powerful Internet con­nec­tion is essential to provide all players with the smoothest possible gaming ex­per­i­ence. The simpler and more con­veni­ent al­tern­at­ive is to put Terraria server hosting in the hands of a provider who will take care of all the ele­ment­ary points, such as the avail­ab­il­ity, main­ten­ance, and per­form­ance of the Terraria server.

The hardware re­quire­ments for a Terraria server are - un­sur­pris­ingly due to the 2D look - re­l­at­ively minimal. The RAM is important, though. The de­velopers give a starting value of 512 MB for a small game world with a few players and no modi­fic­a­tions. For larger worlds, you should have at least 1 GB or 2 GB (10 players or more) ready. If you plan to host a Terraria server for more than 50 players, however, 4 GB or more is re­com­men­ded. In addition, there are the main memory re­quire­ments of the operating system - for Windows Server 2016, for example, this would be 512 MB or 2 GB of RAM (without or with graphical user interface, re­spect­ively).

CPU and hard drive space don’t really play a role in Terraria server hosting. A processor with 2 GHz should give a single server instance the necessary computing power. As far as disk space is concerned, it is suf­fi­cient to have a few gigabytes available in order to have enough space for user data in the long run. In addition, there would also be the resource re­quire­ments of the operating system in this case - so for the Windows system mentioned, which we also use in the following tutorial, an ad­di­tion­al 32 GB of hard disk space and a 1.4 GHz processor (64-bit) would have to be planned.

Renting resources for your own Terraria server means that you are not only much more flexible - for example, should you no longer need the server or want to shut it down tem­por­ar­ily, but you also save money if you don’t have to buy and maintain the hardware for your own server yourself and pay the incurred elec­tri­city bill!

The right package for you for your server hardware varies from provider to provider. At IONOS, for example, you can choose between the following three solutions:

• vServer (Virtual Private Server, in short VPS)
• Cloud Server
• Dedicated Server

For Terraria server hosting, the first two options are re­com­men­ded, both of which are based on vir­tu­al­ised hardware resources. The dif­fer­ence is that with a vServer, you rent a fixed hardware setup for a fixed monthly price, while with a Cloud Server you can ramp up or down the computing power at any time and only pay for what you actually use. A dedicated server gives you access to dedicated hardware that is reserved es­pe­cially for you. For a Terraria server you don’t need this level of server, but if you are also planning other more computer-intensive game servers and want to host, for example, a Minecraft server or a Rust server, you’ll be perfectly equipped with a dedicated server.

We have sum­mar­ised three possible scenarios for your own Terraria server including suitable packages for vServer and dedicated server at IONOS for you:

Have you found the right solution for your Terraria server hosting? Then you can get started! In the following in­struc­tions we will show you how to set up a Terraria server based on Windows Server 2016 as an IONOS customer (vServer, Cloud Server, Dedicated Server).

Confirm opening the file using the standard Remote Desktop Con­nec­tion ap­plic­a­tion by pressing OK. Al­tern­at­ively, you can save the .rdp file locally and then double-click to launch it. To establish the con­nec­tion to the Terraria server, you will now be prompted to enter your cre­den­tials. Provided you have not yet defined your own settings for the account, you will find the username and initial password in the cre­den­tials in the Cloud Panel.

If you have not already installed it on your server, the next step is to download and install the latest version of the Microsoft XNA framework. The framework contains the necessary runtime com­pon­ents to run a Terraria server. You can get the files for the in­stall­a­tion directly from the Microsoft website.

Even before the first start you can define the basic setup of your Terraria server in the server­con­fig.txt. You can open the text file with any editor - the possible settings include the name and password of the server, the desired maximum number of players, the dif­fi­culty level or the server language. You can find a detailed list in the section ‘Server config file’ in the official Terraria Wiki.

Click on ‘Add rule’ to start the port sharing process, which may take a few minutes.